Fferllys, that is a beautiful flag; perfect for a Radnorshire which is independent of Powys. We at the RLF must move on from the flag debate, however interesting. After all, when Powys goes the way of Dyfed and Radnorshire is free once more, the RLF will cease to exist, and our flag will become but a glorious memory. Cynod Sir Faesyfed!

Moving away from the flag debate – won’t you seek to re-unify Ceri with Maelienydd and thereby add it to Radnorshire as should have been the case when the county was first created? Buellt wouldn’t come amiss either, then Rhwng Gwy a Hafren would be pretty much back again! Whoever thought up the idea of Buellt being hooked up with Brycheiniog to create Brecknockshire, and place Ceri in Montgomeryshire, as if it was Powys Gwenwynwyn 🙂

At the risk of injecting some realism . . . Rather than Powys going the way of Dyfed, the next local government reorganisation will be all about size, and so Powys may not be big enough to survive. Montgomeryshire could end up being run from Wrecsam while B & R could be linked with somewhere like Merthyr. Then you’d have to work a white sock into any new standard.

A degree of realism is always welcome. A representative of the RLF District Council ended up having tea with the Mayor of Welshpool yesterday, and he was saying how Brecon and Radnor are likely to be subsumed into a Mid Wales region, maybe with Ceredigion. Montgomeryshire, as you say, would be run from Wrecsam in a north east region. Gwynedd and Anglesy as a north west region. Then there would be a ‘South’ region (presumably Carmarthen, Pembroke, Glamorgan and Monmouth); with Cardiff and Swansea as seperate authorities. But according to him, and according to the people from the WAG who were consulting with him on these plans, greater powers would then be devolved to something like the old town boroughs. Very interesting stuff.
We at the RLF, however, can only take so much realism. We are mutual-aid Kropotkinistas, and we are calling for Radnorshire to be run on anarcho-syndicalist lines.
But we’ll settle for getting rid of the Shire Independents.

Jac o’the North is clearly right. Powys will be changed once more, whatever the historical appropriateness of the next series of bureaucratic local government boundaries that people think up, and new regions invented.

When Eric Pickles made his announcement about preserving the counties of England and bringing back Cumberland etc (announced on St George’s Day this year), it transpired that the local government acts that created the new counties etc, had not in fact dissolved the old ones, in respect of their boundaries. So it seems that from that time any roadsigns on the boundaries should never have been removed. I wrote to Pickles cc’d to an MP asking about what this meant for Radnorshire – the answer he got from one of the Assembly bods was that Welsh counties had been got rid of and that it was impractical to bring them back – this despite my suggestion that the integrity of their historic boundaries be marked and and preserved and signs returned where they had been removed. The point is that local government boundaries will change and change again, along with NHS boundaries etc etc, and it therefore makes some sense to ensure that the old boundaries are remembered, and identities continue to exist in sync with them – i.e. Radnorians can continue to exist even if the county doesn’t as a political/government construct. But the Assembly bod (I have mislaid the letter so have no name for the moment!), didn’t appear to think of anything but the administrative functioning of an area, and the idea of a geographic / historic identity was meaningless to him.

Mr Pickles has yet to reply (I just got a reply from his office to a letter from 2011!!!), so neither he, nor the man at the Assembly responded to my other request that Ceri and Buellt be joined with Radnorshire, to return Rhwng Gwy a Hafren to its near-original boundaries 🙂 – I suspect that Mr Pickles is still in a pickle trying to figure out where or what Rhwng Gwy a Hafren is, and I’ll bet the man from Cardiff hadn’t heard of it either 🙂

…good to give them some history to chew on for now anyway.

Perhaps the map should be set, with even older boundaries pre the Tudor counties – all with road signs to inform people when they cross into each unit? But I suspect that non-one will ever agree precisely where the borders all lay.

The RLF thanks you Ffrellys. Really interesting stuff. We think you are onto something with the signs. Over the next few months, the RLF are planning to put up some samizdat signs at border crossings. Keep an eye out.

Here is one that still survived into the 1990s, and may still be there right next to the wall of the bridge across the Wye from Builth (A470) into Radnorshire:

A quick look on streetview / googlemaps seems to show that the sign no longer exists…unless my memory is awry and it wasn’t at that spot!

The point is that these signs should not have been taken down – in England the legislation maintained the old counties and so their boundaries are still valid today, according to Pickles & Co. What the legal status is in Wales, I do not know. There have been a series of county boundary changes. The question is whether these changes preserves the historical counties in any way.